Category: events

We are staging the latest group exhibition of Furillen pictures next week, with the opening of “Furillen in Snow” at Midday SLT on Tuesday 12 September. There are sixteen pictures in this exhibition, and to select them we searched right back to the earliest few weeks of the sim’s life, in late 2015.

Choosing from such a large pool was as fascinating as it was difficult. Please do not be offended if your picture has not been chosen – these group shows are not competitive in any way: it is simply a selection of pictures that we think work together quite well. Many of the pictures included in this show are from 2015-16, because we felt it would be interesting to look back on some ‘classics’.

We are also very pleased to include a picture taken at the sim by the late lamented Amona Savira. Amona took some very beautiful and striking pictures at Furillen, and although I barely knew her, I am surely not the only person who misses her distinctive and subtle photography.

In other news, the weather at Furillen is somewhat changeable as we move into September and Autumn – or Höst, in Swedish. While visitors may well encounter both rain and snow, the ‘default’ setting at the sim has been switched back to summer/spring – hence the emergence of more wildlife and some new trees, and the re-appearance of the swimming pool behind the hotel. Long-time visitors to the sim will know that the weather and windlight settings – and ground textures – switch around quite a bit, so arrive prepared for anything.

As the real Hotel Fabriken – as pictured above: a pretty good imitation of our Second Life version [sic] – closes its doors in anticipation of another grim winter in Gotland, I’m returning from my own summer break in the Italian Dolomites with a fresh mind and aching legs. It’s time, then, to make a couple of announcements …

Second, we have something new on the horizon … another sister sim for Furillen. Just as we opened La Digue du Braek for a few months last year, this new sim will be for a limited time only. I’ve been researching this place on and off for almost two years. I don’t want to say too much about it now, other than that it corresponds to a real location somewhere in Russia. It’s on YouTube, but not Street View. So that narrows it down a bit for you …

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we have a new exhibition coming up at Furillen: next Tuesday, in fact. This will be a series of sixteen pictures taken of (and at) the sim by Imani Nayar.

I’ve been following Imani’s work for quite a while. If you reach back into her stream, you’ll see a talent for empty landscapes in images like this or this or this. She also has a striking ability to capture people who are, as it were, in the act of intense and silent contemplation: as in the poster for this show, or this, this and this. The atmosphere in these pictures – other worldly, uneasy, temporally displaced – is extraordinary and intense. She’s the perfect Furillen photographer, in other words, and this collection is stunning.

The exhibition will be hosted in the gallery – the old shipyard building – on the NW corner of the sim. I like this building a lot, and it’s nice to see it back where it was when the sim first opened in October 2015. We have held quite a few exhibitions there, and the space and light provide exactly the right backdrop for Imani’s pictures.

Furillen started life as a bleak, snow-bound place, and most visitors who know and love the sim enjoy seeing it return to this form from time to time. So as the grid seethes with summer, come to Furillen and think of winter … shiver and freeze, and wallow in the imagined misery of northern Europe’s darkest months.

As you do so, remember to take some pictures. Our next ‘group’ exhibition – starting in August – will be “Furillen in snow”, and we’ll be reaching right back into the 10,200 pictures of the Furillen Flickr group for some deep cuts.

Before that, we have another exhibition planned, and I’ll be making an announcement about this in the next couple of days.

The pictures span the period since the sim re-opened – following the Star Wars event that ran through the holiday period – with some important additions, such as the Hotel Fabriken and fishing village. Those new features of the sim appear in this collection – which is focused entirely on the ground part of the sim – alongside more familiar structures, such as the pier.

Thanks to everyone who has agreed to take part in this. Given the really high quality of the pictures in the Furillen Flickr group, it was tough narrowing it down. But we will surely hold more exhibitions on various themes that will enable some of the other great pictures of the sim – past and future! – to be featured.

Do come along to the opening if you have time, we’ll play a few tunes.

We are exhibiting a new collection of seven real life photographs taken by Laura – this Thursday in Gotham Warehouse, just off the city’s main square. It is called “Vagabonds” …

Laura has exhibited at Furillen a number of times, most memorably perhaps with Birds. This new collection follows a period during which she has rethought various aspects of her style. Whereas one of the most notable features of Laura’s photographs up to now has been the unusual angles she uses, the images in this new set are – to my eye, at least – fundamentally about place and time.

“Vagabond” literally means “a person who wanders from place to place without a home or job”, or “having no settled home”, and as you will see on Thursday, this spirit pervades the new set of photographs in quite a profound way.

… so get your leotards and leggings out of the closet and get ready for some of this …

Partly for the occasion, and also because we like it, we have installed a new venue, right next to Chinatown where the boxing hall and pizzeria used to be. We called it The Dork Knight …

… and it’s loud and bright – inside, at least. This is the second new building from Nomad that has been installed at the sim during the past week, the other being the beautiful Stockholm-inspired Mjölnir Kompaniet, which fits perfectly on the ground and seems true to the Swedish origins of the sim …

And just in case you missed it, we are also planning a mega-event, dedicated to The Beatles in general, and specifically to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This will be held during June, and although we’ve hardly even started the planning, it’s likely to be on a similar scale to the previous events devoted to Bowie, Radiohead and Pink Floyd. It will therefore involve transforming the ground part of the sim, so expect a few days of closure during late May.

Meanwhile, to celebrate our new building – and to show we don’t take this Batman stuff too seriously – I leave you with this …

Most of those who had their pictures included were able to show up, and it was enjoyable meeting some of you for the first time. What I really like about the show – which features images of Furillen City taken during its first month – is the sheer variety of pictures as well as photographers.

The city is not the easiest place to take photographs: there are no soft ‘gimme’ shots because the best angles are tricky to find, and the texture load means that those with ‘normal’ graphics cards are prone to crashing as they try to fix their shot. It’s also quite a complicated place to explore, as any city should be! So do visit the show if you haven’t done so, because the pictures on display here are terrific.

So … what’s next? The plan is to keep this show open for most of May, and then put on another show at the beginning of June – this time, of pictures taken on the ground part of the sim. We’ll keep things simple and just call it “Furillen is …”.

The Furillen Flickr group is huge, of course, with over 9700 pictures, of which the vast majority were taken on ground level – so how to select? I think we’ll stick to pictures of the latest iteration of the sim, which we called Furillen 3.0 and opened on 8 January 2017. It will still be tough pulling out 24 highlights from the many, many images of Furillen taken since then, but we’ll do our best. What’s guaranteed is that the quality will be very high indeed.

We’ll be making the selection around mid-May, so it isn’t too late to be included if you still have that killer shot in mind … or, perhaps, sitting on your hard drive.

Furillen City has been open since the beginning of April, and as ever, the Flickr stream has been busy, with some excellent pictures taken by some very talented visitors. We decided to mark the first month with an exhibition of our favourites, which will open in the massive Trident Intercontinental Shipping Hangar – quite radically modified as an exhibition space – next Tuesday, 2nd May.

We will be holding similar shows for pictures of the ground part of the sim – and will be re-opening the gallery on that level specifically for the purpose when the time comes – in the near future. Look out for notices about this, and if you are a photographer yourself, an invitation to participate.

For geeks, the title of this particular show is a reference to the very first page of the very first volume of one of the most successful recent ‘resets’ of the Batman series, and one of my own personal favourites, The New 52. Here it is …

Long-time visitors to Furillen might be excused for assuming that its owners are minimalist snobs … or geeks with childish obsessions like Star Wars and Batman … or that we have our ears tuned permanently to the depressing sounds of Radiohead. But nothing could be further from the truth. The sim is – always has been, always will be – a silent tribute to an event that detonated into the popular culture in 1977.

But to us, one event stands above all of these for its lasting significance and impact on our lives and the lives of countless others. On 14 December 1977, cinema audiences watched in awe as the camera swept across Brooklyn Bridge, the Verrazano–Narrows Bridge, the B line subway train, until … finally … we saw these shoes …

… and heard that great song fading in with those first two immortal lines …

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk
I’m a woman’s man: no time to talk

… the camera panned up, and there he was, Tony Manero himself, and we could indeed ‘tell by the way he uses his walk’ …

… that life just got a whole lot better, that music got a whole lot richer, and that disco dancing will never be quite the same again. Because, let’s be absolutely honest, what’s not to love and admire – really – about the music of the Bee Gees …

All of which is simply a way of announcing that we’ll be staging our own tribute to Saturday Night Fever after 40 years, as the Iceberg Lounge gets the playlist it deserves, this coming Tuesday.

So … as you throw open those wardrobe doors and select your sequinned outfits for the celebrations, here it is, that four minute sequence that changed the world …